Psychology

This volume gathers scholars in philosophy, psychology, religion, and sociology variety of disciplines to meet the challenge of how to think trauma and transcendence inlight of the interdisciplinary character of the field of Trauma Studies and its splintering across the multiple theoretical approaches.

Moses and Monotheism brings together fundamental new contributions to discourses on Freud and Moses, as well as new research on the intersections of theology, political theory, and history in Freud’s psychoanalytic work.

Key moments of our lives, especially at the beginning and end, are marked by gentleness—but the simplicity of that concept is misleading. Gentleness is an active passivity that may become an extraordinary...

Draws on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theories, among others, to examine the psychic effects of illness, in particular cancer, on the life and work of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, poet Audre Lorde, and literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Also discusses psychic and material culture at the Freud Museums in London and Vienna.

Ego Sum proposes a provocative and unprecedented reading of Descartes. By paying attention to mode of presentation of Descartes’s philosophy, Nancy challenges our common understanding of the Cogito and shows how Descartes’s ego is not the self-certain, self-transparent Subject of metaphysics but a mouth that opens to utter: ego sum.

Confidentiality and Its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy explores the human stories arising from the psychotherapist’s dual allegiance to patient and society. These dilemmas include the hazards of publishing a case study without the patient’s permission and the unexpected problems arising from the therapist functioning as a "double agent."

The book Chronicle of Separation is an attempt to write on Derrida, to Derrida and from Derrida on the basis of a pathetic experience, which, in various ways, describes and enacts the pathetic experience of deconstruction itself. The book tackles the weight of emotions that is at the heart of deconstructive reading.

Analyzes Aristotle’s natural philosophy and metaphysics from a feminist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic perspective, showing that Aristotelian teleology relies on the disparagement of chance and the feminine simultaneously and finding resources therein for contemporary feminist thought.

Reevaluates the role of war in politics and society based on an expanded definition of the violence that it entails, with special attention to the destruction of nonliving things such as dead bodies, cities, artworks, archives, or languages, and to extreme violence such as torture and rape.

This book describes the centrality of trauma to Freud’s thought, the moments of its apparent abandonment and later recurrences, from the seduction theory to the Death Drive. At these turning points Freud engages with the works of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Hoffmann and da Vinci as thought experiments in the imaginary space of literature and painting.

Through an engagement with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida, this book argues for a rethinking of the concept of narcissism and aims to wrest it from its common and pejorative meanings, egoism and vanity, revealing the complexity and importance of this notion.

Witnessing Witnessing approaches Holocaust survivor testimony by focusing attention on those who receive it. It challenges current theoretical views about trauma and the Holocaust that tend to silence the voices of survivors, and seeks to show how making these voices heard requires a practice of community.

This study investigates the relationship of objects and affects in literary and philosophical texts from the 18th to the 20th century. It focuses on the obstinate obtrusiveness of objects, which refuse to disappear into their automatic, unconscious functionality, instead remaining conspicuous thereby causing humorous outbursts of anger and rage.

This book examines informed consent to psychoanalysis. It reviews the law. It examines informed consent as a theoretical matter: e.g., is it possible, is it countertherapeutic? It reports on a survey of analysts. The goal is to shed psychoanalytic light on a concept which has changed the delivery of healthcare.

Corpus II is a collection of recent essays by Jean-Luc Nancy dealing with embodiment, sexuality, pleasure and the crossing of borders and boundaries. It is both a celebration of our sexual existence and an unflinching philosophical reflection on all our ways of being together.

The Singularity of Being offers a Lacanian interpretation on what makes each of us a unique and irreplaceable creature. Focusing on the Lacanian real, it builds a theory of individual distinctiveness while also intervening in critical debates about subjectivity, agency, resistance, the self-other relationship, and effective political and ethical action.

The book advances a new theoretical framework for understanding the politics of national hatred as a discourse which characterizes today's many national, ethnic and religious conflicts. It offers a critique of hatred as an ideological apparatus of power that operates within discourse as a defense strategy.

This book addresses the issue of trauma and psychic wounds to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology. In so doing, it reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather appears as its very locus. A philosophical approach of the “new wounded” (brain lesion patients) forms the matter of the confrontation.

This book analyses the relationship between the body, technology and language by focusing on the uncanny figure of the mother in psychoanalysis, photography, and literature and contends that the concept of human birth is represented through mechanical repetition and technological modes of reproduction rather than as a natural event.

Interstices of the Sublime represents a powerful theological engagement with psychoanalytic theory in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and Zizek, as well as major expressions of contemporary Continental philosophy,...